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Issue Number 32, October 2009
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 32, October 2009
CORY AQUINO
- Murray Horton
The death of former President Corazon Aquino in August
2009, after a long battle with cancer, sparked off a wave
of emotion and rose-tinted remembrances, not only in the
Philippines but around the world. Headlines such as
“Cory: bearer of democracy, peacemaker,
compassionate leader” were commonplace. Time, in
particular, went over the top, with headlines such as
“The Saint of Democracy” and “A Miracle
Worker in a Plain Yellow Dress”, plus a reprint of
its coverage from when it anointed her Woman of the Year
for 1986 (17/8/09). The story of how she became the
figurehead leader of a peaceful mass uprising that swept
the murderous Marcos dictatorship out of power is well
known and was one of the central events of the second
half of the 20th Century.
There was nothing in her early life to indicate what she
would become. She was born a Cojuangco, one of the most
prominent families in the traditional landowning ruling
class (in a semi-feudal society such as the Philippines,
land ownership means power). Her father was a Senator;
her mother the daughter of a Congressman. She was
educated in the US; then married Benigno
(“Ninoy”) Aquino, a member of another prominent
family. He became a leading political opponent of Marcos,
Cory stayed home as a housewife, raising their five kids.
The quiet life ended when Marcos declared martial law in
1972 and imprisoned thousands of opponents. Ninoy Aquino
was slapped with trumped up charges of murder and
subversion, and sentenced to death by a military
tribunal, which was commuted to imprisonment. He spent
eight years there, until pressure from the Americans,
Marcos’ most important backer as a “bastion
against Communism”, allowed him to go to the US for
heart surgery. The Aquino family lived in the US for
three years, which Cory described as the happiest days of
their lives.
People Power
Philippine, and world, history changed irrevocably in
August 1983 when Ninoy flew back to Manila in response to
calls to come home and head the anti-Marcos opposition.
He knew that his life would be in danger and he was
proven fatally right. Before he had even set foot on
Philippine soil, he was shot dead in broad daylight
coming down the ramp of the aircraft at Manila Airport,
despite travelling with a number of foreign journalists.
It was one of the most blatant political assassinations
of the 20th Century and it was to mark the beginning of
the end of the Marcos dictatorship (the Government,
ludicrously, blamed it on the Communists; some military
men were later charged and acquitted for the murder; none
of the masterminds have ever been touched). Ninoy’s
funeral was one of the biggest in world history and his
widow Cory, always dressed in yellow, became the focus of
the long suppressed opposition to Marcos. She had no love
for politics and no experience and when, in 1985, Marcos
called a snap election (to placate the Americans), she
only agreed to run if a million people asked her to do
so. A million people duly signed a petition urging her to
run, so she reluctantly agreed. Marcos dismissed her as
“a housewife” and claimed victory in a February
1986 election that was outrageously rigged and corrupt,
even by Philippine standards.
What happened next was inspirational – hundreds of
thousands of ordinary Filipinos, with the backing of the
Catholic hierarchy and the Church’s radio network,
took to the streets and surrounded the Presidential
Palace in what became known as People Power (which is the
greatest gift the Philippine people have bestowed on the
rest of the world, and it has been copied in numerous
other countries). The eyes of the world were on the
Philippines and I well remember the feelings of both
elation and dread as I watched it on TV. Marcos’
hardline generals urged him to massacre the crowd, to
bomb them. But tanks were stopped in their tracks by nuns
armed only with rosary beads and then some of the leading
military figures in the martial law regime defected to
the opposition. Marcos knew he was doomed; he and his
revolting family and key figures in the dictatorship were
flown out of the besieged Palace by US helicopters (he
died in 1989, in Hawaiian exile). People Power had
triumphed, with no bloodshed, and Cory Aquino was sworn
in as the new President.
Marcos Was Overthrown By Millions, Not Just One
Woman
As far as the Western media was concerned, Cory Aquino
singlehandedly overthrew the Marcos dictatorship. Nothing
could be further from the truth. She was simply the
figurehead of a movement of millions, many of whom
suffered horrible fates of imprisonment, torture,
disappearance and murder. “Yes, it was Cory Aquino
who rallied the opposition that eventually led to the
ouster of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos; but Filipinos,
especially the so-called martial law babies, should never
forget the other great men and women who dedicated their
lives, suffered, and/or died to restore Philippine
democracy. These heroes should also be acknowledged by
those who want to honour our beloved Cory.
“We also want their lives and names written and
included in the history of our country. Unlike Cory, who
died a glorious, happy death, these victims suffered
tremendously and were tortured mercilessly. Many were
separated from their families and a number of them remain
desaparecidos up to this day. Even pregnant women were
not spared. Like my sister Liliosa, the first victim
inside Camp Crame, who was gang raped by her captors.
After barely two days of captivity, she was killed. Her
mouth was used as an ash tray as evidenced by the wounds
that were left by lighted cigarette butts snuffed out
against her lips…Her life was nipped in the bud two
weeks before her graduation…” (Philippine
Daily Inquirer, Letters To The Editor,
“Remember other anti-Marcos heroes”, 21/8/09).
The writer is an aunt of my wife; she is writing about
the terrible torture, rape and murder of her sister,
another aunt of my wife. Three other siblings were
imprisoned without trial during martial law – one of
them, Marie Hilao-Enriquez, is the high profile head of
Karapatan, the Philippines’ leading human rights
organisation (Marie did a 2004 speaking tour of NZ,
hosted by PSNA; you can read both her speech and my
report of her tour, in Kapatiran 25/26, December
2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/psna/Kapatiran/KapNo25n26/Kap25n26List.htm). Liliosa’s mother (my
wife’s grandmother) was the lead plaintiff in the
early 1990s’ class action suit in a Honolulu court
against the Marcos estate by 10,000 human rights victims
or their families. They were awarded $US1.2 billion
damages, of which not one cent has been collected from
the Marcoses. Liliosa’s mother has since died;
Imelda Marcos, the surviving half of what was known as
the Conjugal Dictatorship, remains unscathed and
unrepentant, having been back in the Philippines since
1991 and back in the thick of the handful of parasitic
families who own the Philippines and suck it dry.
Philippine newspapers, even the progressive ones, still
have society pages. When we were in Manila over Christmas
2008, staying with my mother-in-law (one of
Liliosa’s older sisters), I kept coming across the
names of Imelda and her children in the sycophantic
reports of the endless parties and social events with
which these bludgers fill their days and nights.
Hopes were high, unrealistically so, when Cory became
President in 1986. As far as New Zealand was concerned,
the final years of the Marcos dictatorship and the early
years of the Aquino government were the period of
greatest public awareness of the Philippines. It was
during this time that the Philippines Solidarity movement
in this country was born and was at its strongest and
most active; the first world leader to visit President
Aquino was NZ Prime Minister David Lange (you can gauge
the fall-off in official NZ interest in the Philippines
when you realise that the next PM to visit wasn’t
until Helen Clark in 2006, fully 20 years later).
Cory Did Some Good Things As President
Personally, she was a complete and utter contrast to the
murderous, unbelievably corrupt and grotesque Marcoses,
whose reign of terror and kleptocracy had brought the
country to ruins. Cory could be criticised for many
things but she wasn’t corrupt, quite the opposite.
Unlike so many other “trapos” (traditional
politicians; it’s also the Filipino word for a
cleaning rag) she paid more than lip service to
Christianity and did not treat the country’s
Treasury as her personal piggy bank. The 1987
Constitution, which is still in place, established a
Presidential limit of a single six year term and Cory
duly left office in 1992 (it is this aspect of the
Constitution that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is
trying frantically to change via various Charter Change
[Cha-Cha] manoeuvres, in order to stay in power beyond
the May 2010 election). Cory took steps to make harder
the declaration of martial law. In the 23 years since
Marcos was overthrown, there have been endless rumours of
imminent martial law, usually going hand in glove with
rumours of a coup (there have been no shortage of coup
attempts) but it has never been invoked again. The
closest the country came to it was Gloria’s February
2006 shortlived declaration of a state of emergency,
accompanied by an attempted crackdown on, and round up
of, political opponents.
Cory established the Presidential Commission on Good
Government, which still exists, and which was tasked to
go after the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses and their
cronies. Its record has been feeble and the criminals who
used the State to enrich themselves (including some of
Cory’s own Cojuangco relatives) during the
dictatorship have still got their loot. She freed
political prisoners, including the likes of Joma Sison,
the founder and leading figure of the Communist Party of
the Philippines and there was a ceasefire with the
Party’s New People’s Army. It didn’t last
long and the war continues to this day. Sison was able to
leave the country for an international speaking tour,
including New Zealand (I heard him speak in Christchurch
in 1986), but then Cory’s government withdrew his
passport and he has lived ever since as an exile in The
Netherlands constantly fighting off attempts by the Dutch
to get rid of him and of the Philippines to get him back
to face numerous trumped up charges (in 2007 the two
governments collaborated to have him briefly imprisoned
in The Netherlands on trumped up historic murder charges.
The case was thrown out at its first legal hurdle in a
Dutch court and Sison remains a free man, albeit one who
is under numerous restrictions as a result of being on
the list of international terrorists cobbled together by
the US, UN and various other governments in the hysteria
after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the
US). She (re)introduced democracy to the Philippines but
it needs to be stressed that it is a democracy in name
only. It has all the trappings and the fancy titles but
none of the substance. And it is an extreme example of
elite democracy, one in which formal political power is
swapped back and forth between members of the tiny number
of rich landowning clans who own and run the country for
their own benefit (and Cory came from one of the very
worst of those families). Of course, in the case of
Gloria, she doesn’t want to swap power with anyone,
whether they’re from the ruling class or not –
she wants to greedily hang onto it for as long as
possible.
Before enumerating Cory’s major failings as
President, it has to be said that she was under constant
pressure from the military, which had been the brutal
enforcers of Marcos’ dictatorship and whose generals
had profited mightily from it. There was nothing subtle
about it, she was subjected to several coup attempts from
some of the very same officers who had defected from
Marcos and joined the People Power movement when they
realised that time had run out for their old boss. Some
of these coup attempts were laughable but at least a
couple of them were deadly serious, with fatalities,
involving attacks on the Palace (Cory always denied that
she cowered under her bed or a table during one). The US
directly interfered in one late 80s’ attempted coup,
sending jet fighters flying low over Manila to warn the
coupsters to back off. The message was that Cory was
their President now, it was no longer politically
expedient to be seen backing a military dictatorship,
they could get what they wanted from the Philippines as
“a democracy” (mind you, as far as the Yanks
were concerned, it always had been. One of the most
infamous moments of the Marcos dictatorship was when the
visiting US Vice President, George Bush, proposed a
toast, declaring: “We love your democracy”!).
Appalling Record Of Human Rights Abuses
To say that Aquino was a disappointment as President is
putting it very mildly indeed. For a start, she was an
ardent advocate of the continued and indefinite presence
of the huge US bases. I visited the Philippines several
times during her 1986-92 Presidency (my longest single
stay in the country was in 1991, when I was among the
tens of thousands who celebrated outside the Senate when
it voted not to renew the bases treaty, and they duly
closed in 1992). This was one of the defining issues in
Philippine history (not to mention American history, and
world history) and, I’m afraid, Cory was very
definitely on the wrong side.
“…The Task Force Detainees of the Philippines,
at the time the country’s leading human rights
group, recorded more than 1.2 million victims of
dislocations due to military operations, 135 cases of
massacres, 1,064 victims of summary executions, 816
disappearances, and 20,523 victims of illegal arrest and
detention, during the six years of Cory’s regime.
Based on these figures, human rights abuses were, in
fact, worse during those six years under Cory than the
past nine years under President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo…In March 1987, in her commencement
speech at the Philippine Military Academy, Aquino
unsheathed the sword of war and declared that ‘the
answer to the terrorism of the Left and the Right is not
social and economic reform but police and military
action’. It was a crucial departure from an earlier
policy of engagement with the Left when, immediately
after she took power, Cory released dozens of political
prisoners, among them the top leaders of the Communist
movement.
“Aquino’s ‘total war’ policy was
essentially patterned after the US military strategy of
‘low intensity conflict’ or LIC. The US came
out with the LIC doctrine in the aftermath of the US
defeat in the Vietnam War. Instead of direct involvement
of American troops in combat, local troops of
‘host’ countries were trained to fight
‘proxy wars’ with rebels or insurgents. The US
government was the principal author of Cory’s
‘total war’ scheme, in charge of funding,
equipment, training, intelligence and other requirements,
according to Bobby Tuazon, a political science professor
at the University of the Philippines and a political
analyst at the Center for People Empowerment in
Governance, a Manila think tank.
“A major component of the LIC is the formation of
vigilante groups or anti-Communist civilian militias in
both urban and rural areas. These vigilante groups not
only performed police and military activities but also
tortured, maimed, mutilated and killed suspected
sympathisers of the New People’s Army (NPA), the
armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Before Cory’s term ended in 1992, some 50 Rightwing
vigilante groups backed by the military were formed all
over the country. Among the most notorious of these
civilian militiamen was Edilberto Manero, who led the
Tadtad, an anti-Communist religious cult in North
Cotabato that killed Father Tullio Favali in 1987 and,
according to reports, ate part of the Italian
priest’s brain. Cults such as the Tadtad were widely
used by Cory’s military as part of its LIC strategy
against the Communists.
“Two massacres preceded the collapse of the peace
talks between the Cory regime and the revolutionary
forces. On January 22, 1987, at the historic Mendiola
Bridge, combined elements of the police and military
opened fire at a rally of farmers demanding genuine land
reform. Thirteen farmers were killed and hundreds were
wounded. A month later, on February 10, 1987, another
massacre took place. Seventeen civilians, including six
children and two elderly people were killed by Government
troops in sitio Padlao, barangay Namulandayan, Lupao, in
Nueva Ecija province. The 24 soldiers of the 14th
Infantry Battalion who were allegedly involved in the
massacre were later acquitted by the military court. Two
leaders of progressive organisations were also
assassinated. On September 19, 1987, Lean Alejandro,
secretary general of BAYAN was gunned down. Earlier, on
November 13, 1986, KMU leader Rolando Olalia and his
driver/companion Leonor Alay-ay were brutally murdered.
Cory herself vowed to bring the killers to court but the
cases were never solved.
“While Cory released political prisoners, among her
very first acts was to give amnesty to perpetrators of
human rights violations under the Marcos dictatorship.
‘She gave a blanket amnesty to the architects and
implementors of martial law’, Tuazon, the UP
professor, said. The amnesty was given despite the
clamour for justice and accountability among the
thousands of Marcos victims. ‘Not a single human
rights violator had been properly and successfully
prosecuted and punished,” said Carol
Pagaduan-Araullo, a longtime activist and chairperson of
BAYAN. Worse, victims of human rights abuses during
Marcos ‘never got justice or indemnification’.
CARP = Sham Land Reform
“For Tuazon, the major human-rights violation
committed by Cory was the failure of her own
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). ‘By
exempting her own hacienda (from land distribution),
Aquino violated the rights of millions of farmers’.
Her claim of being pro-democracy, Tuazon said, was
shattered by this act of protecting her own family’s
interests. The Aquinos and the Cojuangcos own Hacienda
Luisita in Tarlac. Signed on June 10, 1988, by Cory, CARP
vowed to emancipate the peasants from landlessness.
However, the Cojuangco-Aquino landed clan managed to
skirt the law through what are called non-land transfer
schemes. CARP gives option to landowners to choose
‘all other arrangements alternative to the physical
distribution of lands, such as production or
profit-sharing, labour administration, and distribution
of shares of stocks which will allow beneficiaries to
receive a just share of the fruits of the lands they
work’.
“In the case of Hacienda Luisita, it preferred the
stock distribution option, which made farmers and
peasants veritable investors in the hacienda but never
owners of the land that they have been tilling for
decades. Then came the Hacienda Luisita massacre. On
November 16, 2004, elements of the police and military
opened fire at the striking farm workers of Hacienda
Luisita, resulting in the death of 14 farmers, including
women and children, and the wounding of 200 others.
‘The lack of genuine social and economic reforms and
other failings in her presidency contributed much to the
fading away of the People Power spirit, as indicated by
the decreasing people’s participation in subsequent
anniversaries’, Tuazon said. ‘If we mean
democracy by the turnover of power to the people, it was
not the case. What happened is a transfer of power from
one faction of the elite to another’” (Bulatlat,
www.bulatlat.com, 9/8/09; “Cory Aquino And Human
Rights: An Appraisal”, Ronalyn V Olea).
The above extract from the online Bulatlat
article on Cory rang many bells for me. I arrived in
Manila for the first time on the September 1987 day that
Lean Alejandro was murdered and things were very jittery
indeed. The activists staying at my accommodation (some
of them national figures) expected a coup and went into
hiding. I attended Alejandro’s lying in state and
saw for myself the damage done by the assassins’
bullets. On that same exposure tour our group stayed at
the Bishop’s Palace at Kidapawan, North Cotabato
(Mindanao). Father Tullio Favali was buried there and we
had to look at the ghastly photos of his body after the
death squad had murdered him. In that same province we
spent a night with a family who were holding a vigil over
the murdered body of their father, a peasant organiser
and Catholic Church worker. In both cases the victims had
been hacked to death with machetes. In January 1989, I
was among the crowd at the second anniversary of the
Mendiola Massacre, where peasants were gunned down
outside the Presidential Palace. And, in December 2008, I
was in Manila (on a family holiday this time) when CARP
expired and the rich landowners who dominate the Congress
and Senate ignored the pleas of hunger striking peasants
(joined in their fast by Catholic bishops, for the first
time) but voted a brief extension that left any transfer
of land to the landless peasants an entirely voluntary
option for landowners.
For the purposes of this obituary, I hunted out and read,
for the first time in many, many years, my 15 typewritten
page report on my 1987 exposure tour to the Philippines.
That was a trip down memory lane! A couple of quotes from
it will suffice. “But does Aquino know what’s
going on, in regard to the death squads and the
systematic reign of terror? Oh yes, she knows and she
approves. Both her and Cardinal Sin (the then head of the
Church in the Philippines and a key figure in mobilising
People Power) have endorsed what they call
‘unarmed’ vigilantes i.e. machetes, not guns,
as a legitimate means of self-defence against Communism.
She actually compared them to People Power… But
don’t just take my word for it. Here’s a quote
from the (Christchurch) Star of October 31st
(1987), reporting her visit to Davao City, Mindanao.
‘…the Philippines President, Mrs Corazon
Aquino, sparked howls of protests from civil rights
groups by publicly endorsing the Alsa Masa (one of the
biggest and most notorious of the death squads) during an
unscheduled stop at the group’s slum birthplace
during a lightning tour of southern Mindanao. Escorted
from her helicopter by an honour guard of youths with
Alsa Masa emblazoned across their T-shirts, Mrs Aquino
told cheering residents of Agdao: ‘We look up to you
for helping crush the Communists’. So she knows, she
approves, she established them…
“People we spoke to were genuinely puzzled that
Australians and New Zealanders still regard Cory Aquino
as the salvation of democracy in the Philippines. They
pointed out that she had the support of the US, some (but
not all) of the military, and the bourgeoisie. We asked
everyone we met whether they thought they were better or
worse off under Aquino than under Marcos. They all
replied, with a couple of exceptions, worse off. Why?
Obviously the economy is stuffed. But they’ve known
nothing but poverty all their lives. No, there was
something more basic than that. Under Marcos there had
been terror and killings (salvagings is the extremely
inappropriate Filipino word for such murders). But mostly
Marcos jailed his opponents – Joma Sison, founder of
the Communist Party and New People’s Army, survived
nine years’ prison, to be released. But under Aquino
the policy towards all real and imagined political
opponents is – kill them. The brutal truth is –
President Corazon Aquino is a mass murderer…”.
Just Another President
Cory had a long retirement, from 1992 to 2009, during
which time she was regularly wheeled out as an elder
stateswoman. A devout Catholic, she was a prominent
leader of a Church-backed campaign against a family
planning policy of her successor, President Fidel Ramos
(1992-98; the first and thus far, only, Protestant
President). She was prominent again in People Power 2,
which overthrew the amazingly corrupt President Joseph
Estrada in 2001 and elevated his Vice President, Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo, to power. Cory later regretted her role
in that and when we were in Manila in December 08, she
astonished the nation by personally apologising to
Estrada, saying that she had got it wrong and that he
should have stayed in power in preference to Gloria (this
apparent brain explosion was “explained” by
media apologists as being caused by the treatment for her
terminal cancer). God help us, there was even “Cory:
The Musical” while we were in Manila last Christmas
(which was considered mawkish even by the standards of a
country which lays on sentiment with a trowel,
particularly about devout mothers and widows).
The conclusion has to be that Cory Aquino was just
another Philippine President, unfortunately. She suffered
a great and very public tragedy in Ninoy’s murder;
as a result of which she was propelled to power by an
unarmed popular movement that was one of the biggest
events in the history of the second half of the 20th
Century. But once there, she was just another President,
using the military and death squads to enforce a
murderous reign of terror; sucking up to the US and doing
her damndest to keep their bases in the Philippines;
perpetuating the wealth and power of the tiny, greedy and
violent landowning class to which she belonged. She
looked good only in contrast to the monster Marcos whom
she replaced. The Philippines is still waiting for
leadership that will produce any kind of progressive
change and it’s not likely to come from within the
ranks of those who have been bleeding the country and its
people for centuries. #
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